If you're a bureaucrat in D.C., like you're a process person, period, end of story. You grew up in a process. You like the process. The Trump admin realizes that the process is the obstacle. This admin has basically done away with that. Like the principals will make decisions. Hi, I'm Andrew Klavan with this week's interview with Colin Carroll. One of the things that has been astounding about the Trump administration is the use of the military in incredibly successful missions like the one in Iran and the bombing of the Iran nuclear facility and the taking of the leader of Maduro out of Venezuela. are just kind of insane stuff. The military being used at its peak, weaponry being used at its peak, as opposed to Afghanistan, where so many mistakes were made and where the rules of engagement were so constraining. But Colin Carroll is a somewhat controversial figure because he has been inside the administration. He was chief of staff to the deputy secretary of the Department of War under Secretary Hegseth, or as we call him here, the god of war. and he was asked to leave, I would say, in a leaked scandal, which he says was unfair and has had things to say about Pete Hicks that are very interesting and controversial. And I want to hear them all, but I also want to hear about what he thinks about what is happening now because he is an outside voice, which I think is really interesting. We've had people from the inside and we've all heard the criticisms. So I wanted to talk to somebody who is inside. He is now the CEO of Atropos, a defense tech company building autonomous AI-enabled aircraft for the purpose of serving the U.S. military. Colin, thank you for coming on. And I want to say that sounds like a very scary job. Autonomous AI-enabled aircraft sounds like could be a very, very scary weapon there. Oh, man, our airplane is a pretty simple cargo logistics airplane. Oh, yeah, cargo. In the other room, when I relocated over, I was in the hangar over there. You could see a scale mock-up behind me yesterday. But I appreciate you having me on. No, it's a pleasure. Why not tell the story? I know you've told it before, but it's worth hearing again. Tell the story of what happened when you were working within the administration and how that came to an end. Yeah, I mean, I volunteered to leave a great defense tech company and a lot of stock to go into the administration and work for Steve Feinberg. You know, to your average person, the Department of Defense is a big monolith or Department of War. Now it's a monolith, but the reality is it's not at all that. Lots of agendas, lots of roles. Our role in the deputy secretary's office was to do resourcing and acquisition. and I think the approach that we were taking was very early on, but the approach we were taking was a little more hands-on than previous administrations. Typically, that office resources a budget and then immediately takes a month off and then goes right into the next budget. Steve very much wanted to fix some of the execution of the budget, and that's not typically what the deputy's role does. So we created these things called direct report program managers. We moved a bunch of broken programs up to report directly to Steve. we kicked off some new programs a lot of autonomous and unmanned programs to try and rapidly fill capability gaps for china really for china so we were we were less hands-on on the foreign the foreign policy like operational side of the department we sat in all the meetings we would advise on hey you know if you spend 100 munitions on this op it might take you eight years to replace those munitions but uh like that was kind of our role you know i joined the admin i'm I am not a political person, to be quite frank, but I joined the admin. I thought that we were all aligned to the president's agenda. What I learned is it's like when you put a bunch of high-performing people in an organization together, and there's other agendas and there's personalities. I think that that's kind of what came to play. Three of us were casualties of that. I call us my three criminal friends, me, Dan, and Darren. I think the interesting thing about us, though, I'm not going to break any news on your podcast, but you guys should talk to Dan and Darren because they are both going back to be political appointees in this administration. That's really interesting. Yeah. And so I think that probably tells you something. I have a clearance. I go back to Pentagon. I have multiple classified meetings a week. We were accused of leaking. There's a report that will come out at some point, I think, exonerating us. But, you know, there's been no consequences. And I don't think any of the three of us leaked anything. So why did that happen? I mean, this is one of the things that people find, I think, really mystifying about Washington, D.C. under every administration, the Trump administration included. Like, why would they pick you out to do that to you? Yeah. I mean, I think generally in organizations like the Department of War and the administration, like you said, it is a high-strung, high-stress environment. I can tell you we were pulling 18 to 20-hour days, seven days a week. And that was getting Steve up to speed because it was his first time ever doing anything like that. But just a lot going on, right? I mean, every day there's a crisis du jour. The National Security Council is calling down. They want answers at midnight. their own answers at 1 p.m. on a Sunday. And so we were there working. I think in that environment, you know, personalities tend to come to the fore. You know, in this specific admin, there were a bunch of people that had never been in like a situation like that before, quite frankly. And I've never been a chief of staff. I've never worked at the deputy secretary level. So I'm the same way. I'm a pretty aggressive person. You know, the typical chief of staff kind of chiefs of staff and manages the principal. And it's like this process by which things get staffed up for decision. That's not how I am. I very much came in with a desire to change how we acquire stuff. And I think it's a pretty bipartisan agreement that the department sucks at buying things on schedule at cost that work for the warfighter. No one's going to argue that we do that well. So I came in with that in mind. I think Steve came in with that in mind. We tried to stay out of the operational and like policy way, the Big P policy way. I think I just upset some people. I can't speak for Dan and Darren, but my guess is it's a similar thing there. So you were a Marine. You're still a Marine Reserve? Yeah. And you were combat deployed. You were in Afghanistan, I think. I've been to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, the Philippines. All the fun places, okay. And thank you for... Not the really fun places. Well, thank you for that. So you're working with Pete Hegseth, and we always, on my show, we tease him a lot. But he seems to be getting stuff done. I mean, he's kind of an over... He's a large character. There are a lot of large characters in the administration. What was your take on him? Yeah I think that he is the right person for the role I think that he came in I view the like what needs to change in department How do you change a department that you know three million people counting civilians contractors reservists active duty It a massive organization It's the largest organization on earth. How do you change it? There's culture, which is something that he very much focused on. If you read his books, like, that is a thing that he very much cares about. And he's done an excellent job at trying to reset the culture to a more warfighting culture. There's what we acquire. so if you think about how you want to change like like move the titanic um you can change culture but it can also be easily unchanged you get like a generation there of people that come in in a four-year period uh so you enlist them or you you commission them and then they stay you you get rid of some people in that four-year period that maybe aren't the right fit and so you've got this kind of generation that's moving along with culture but that can be easily undone when you buy stuff the way the department buys things, we have it for a hundred years. The B-52 is a great example. That air, that airframe will be there for a hundred years. So if you buy the right things, you really do get like multiple generations of kind of changing the department. And that's what I was really focused on. And then the third thing is how you employ your forces and your stuff in, in, in, uh, operations. And I think that is a super interesting, um, you know, like looking at what, what the department's done really, it's really the national government, what the government's done in the last year. And I had a friend tell me a week ago, if, if Donald Trump had run on a platform of doing the things that he has done in the last year, like it's a, it's a 180 from what he ran on. What I love about the, about this administration and it's, it's the department, but it's the department with Marco Rubio and like the whole cast of characters. And it's a pretty, it's an interesting, I can kind of walk through how the national security council here runs. because that, in my mind, is probably the most unique thing about this administration. But they approach the world in like a deal-making way, and it's straight from the president because this is how he views the world, which is if I see an opportunity, I am going to take that opportunity. I'm going to be decisive as shit, and I'm going to take that opportunity. And fortunately for us, we have a military that can rapidly respond to that and go close in like almost every environment. I don't know if we could do China the way we've done Venezuela or Iran, but basically everybody below that threshold, we can go do it. I think there's a question in the long term of, hey, I use the scalpel to get a result, an immediate result. It's been super effective. What does that look like in one year, three years, five years? The president is interesting. Like maybe 10 days ago, a reporter asked him a question. And he said something like, you know, I asked JSOC for a plan for Greenland. And it didn't really make a lot of press because I think people just don't really understand how the department works. But it's very unusual for an organization like JSOC to be planning an invasion of a country. We've done a very good job of that, right? Like JSOC ran Venezuela. Not Southcom. JSOC ran Venezuela. Everyone else was responding to and being kind of like puppeteered by JSOC. That's awesome for getting rid of Maduro. they're not the best at planning like a multi-year campaign. So I am interested to see how this plays out. But honestly, I think that it keeps keeping everybody on their toes. We're going after opportunities as we see them. We're creating our own opportunities. And to be quite frank, like the alternative was just to do nothing. So I would rather take this and kind of see where it goes than just sit around like waiting for things to happen, which is what we basically do in policy. And ask me about the National Security Council. So I'll explain to you why I think this is the way it is. All right. I'll come back to that in a minute. I want to stick with the acquisition for a second. I mean, because we've all heard these stories of like the bolt that costs like $15,000 and, you know, that the money is thrown away. Trump has mentioned it a couple of times. Is anything going to fix that? Or why has it been like that? You know, why is it so hard to get rid of? And are they getting rid of it? Man, I could spend three hours talking about how we got to where we are. Keep it a little closer. No, there's – I could recommend some things to read. Shamsankar from Palantir wrote 18 Theses about his, like, first breakfast, which is the new kind of revitalization of what happened with the Last Supper back in the 80s at the end of the Cold War when we kind of consolidated industrial base. Just the way the government acquires stuff, you know, it all takes just one contractor to ruin it for everybody. So if someone does fraud or something like that, they just slap on 100 new regulations and then that piles up over 50 years. And so there's just 100 reasons for why it is the way it is. My approach and I think Steve's approach in the deputy's office was, look, we're spending a trillion dollars a year. That is the iceberg. It is an unfixable thing in four years, especially without the help of the Hill, like true help of the Hill, like rewriting Goldwater Nichols. I'm not talking about the speed act and some of these acquisition type of reform things, like truly making change in the department. You can triage to, Hey, what are the, what are the 50 things that matter in a fight? And you've got to get those things right. And I think that's what you're seeing him do with these direct report program managers, which is like, we need these things to be right. Then you can kind of do policy that applies to the other million things. and you kind of cross your fingers and hope that your memos and the guidance that you're pressing out, like people execute that. And I think what we're going to see is there will be change there, but there's also going to be the same people that have been in those roles for 20 years that don't want to change the same contractors on the other side that have been doing this for 50 years and don't want to change. Like that's going to be a harder thing to change, but I think that's okay. I think we just have to get certain things right. As you know, I've lived several lifetimes. I mean, I began in the Jurassic period and a lot of stuff. I've come a long way from where I started, but through it all, my family is by far the most important part of my life, which is why I want to make sure they're taken care of if something happens to me. 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We can fix the hundred billion, that hundred billion is going towards certain capabilities that like, we just need to get right. We need to, they need to work. They need to work on time and they need to work at cost. the other things it's like policy and then you kind of hope that the that over the next three years the people that are executing the policy learn lessons kind of change their mindset and their cultures are executing differently and maybe you get another 10 15 out of that and by the way like that's that's let's say that's 25 change that is a massive amount of change in four years everybody's tried this and no one's gotten anywhere they haven't gotten five percent so So I think it's a slower process, I think, than you or I would like it to be. So when you were in the administration, what drove you crazy? You're sitting in all these meetings. Your expertise is acquisition, but you're also listening. You're a Marine. You've also been overseas. You're listening to people talk policy. What made you think like, uh-oh, like I wish I could change this? i am a firm believer in a concept called mission engineering okay and i think that that's something that's not not well done in the department and so what i mean by mission engineering there's a formal definition but basically it's analysis that that takes like what a warfighter wants and how we fight and then applies it to a capability that we're going to buy at the high level we don't do the best job at that we we sometimes acquire technologies without really understanding like how they integrate into the fight or we'll buy like this one capability without understanding how that capability integrates in with like all the other capabilities that we have. We do a, we do a pretty terrible job of, well, I say this, we do a good job of buying the cool thing without understanding that now the cool thing requires like 20 other changes to just how we operate. And no one kind of thinks that through. And so when we talk about the valley of death, you'll hear the Silicon Valley companies talk about this valley of death, which means like we prototype something, but it never gets procured at scale, produced and procured at scale. A lot of that is because we forget that someone's going to wind up using it and you have to train those people, hire those people, create squadrons of those people, put them at a base somewhere. Congress cares about where that squadron lives, for example. There's a whole process behind this that we kind of just tend to forget about and we just want to go buy something. So that part would always be frustrating to me. People come in with these cool ideas and it's like, how does it fit in the system? Yes, I would love to change system. I'd love to blow the system up. However, the system is there. We can make, you know, tweaks around the edges in a four-year period. We can even make some like pretty large changes in a four-year period. But, you know, you're not going to throw the system out in a four-year period. So it seems to me that just about everything Trump does, at least in terms of foreign policy, is pointed at rejiggering our defenses toward China and away from defending, say, Europe, hoping Europe will start to defend itself. Now, I know people who attend war games in the Pentagon where we play out Chinese conflicts, and they say we keep losing. And this has been reported. It's not a secret. It's been reported. Do you think that they are doing what needs to be done for the future? Are they buying the things that need to be bought? Are they placing them in the right place? I ask because Trump talks about taking over Greenland and everybody acts as if he's crazy, but that's not crazy. I mean, that's something that we need to think about if we're going to defend the ceilings in the Arctic. So I'm wondering about other things like acquiring weapons. Are we acquiring the kind of systems that can defend us against a Chinese Navy, a Chinese Air Force? Yeah. I mean, I think we're just in a really difficult place in time and space. And what I mean by that is we've waited so long to acquire the right things that now you know china the taiwan scenario called taiwan scenario whatever that looks like we're in this thing called the david's window you know there's a there's an actual time frame around when this could happen and it is not 10 years from now it starts much earlier than that so there's a trade between buying more of the same thing i.e it's expensive maybe doesn't work it's hard to produce but like we have those systems that can employ these weapon systems or we know how to build these weapon systems. And then like the research and development to prototype something that can replace that, that even at the fastest level, you know, you're talking seven to eight years, probably a decade plus for some of the larger weapon systems. That's the trade that like Steve definitely is sitting on right now. And, and, you know, I have a saying, which is there are no solutions. There's only trades. That's a really hard trade, right? I have, I have a hundred billion dollars. How do I want to spend it? I need to buy Tomahawks. I need to buy SM sixes. Those are super expensive. We're using them to shoot down things that are very, very cheap. So it's a cost ratio that's very effective for the adversary. However, all of our ships have Mark 41 VLS launch tubes, and that's what goes in them. And there isn't any other employment mechanism. So right now it's like we're going to put $80 billion of that $100 billion into buying the things that we have and maybe $20 billion into prototyping something new. I think if you could erase like all of the tech debt that we have, we'll call it, or weapon system debt that we have and start from scratch, you'd see a completely different force. But the problem is like that's a fantasy. You hear people talk about it, but that's a fantasy, right? We can't do that. We have to be ready today. We can't do it because we take too much time to get back up and running. Yeah. I mean, if you could just hit a pause on the world for six years, we can completely rebuild the military. But then you ignore like operational realities. We would love to not shoot our SM6s, however, because we want them to fight in China. However, you're defending in the Red Sea. You're defending Israel from Iran. You're defending us from Iran. There's all these different things that can pop up, and we need to be ready to fight. So I think when you look at the budget for 27, it'll be the largest top-line budget for DOD that the department submits or really the president submits to Congress. It's going to be massive. It'll be over a trillion dollars. Now, whether Congress funds that and how that plays out remains to be seen. But I think you're going to see a large part of that as procurement of existing weapon systems, even though they might not be exactly what we want in five or six years. It's what we have today. So you were talking about the NSC. You're in the administration. What are you seeing coming out of the National Security Council? It obviously makes you a little nervous. I think that we saw this during Trump one and I'm an outside observer then, but I think that, uh, I've got lots of friends, both sides of the aisle. There's always people that are very nervous. People are nervous. Um, what they're really nervous about, I think at the end of the day is the process. So if you're a, if you're a bureaucrat in DC, like you're a process person, period. End of story. You grew up in a process. You like the process. The Trump admin realizes that the process is the obstacle. So the traditional national security council, you've got deputies meetings and then like principals meetings and then things go back down to deputies meetings. It takes forever to staff something up. This admin is basically just like done away with that. Like the principals will make decisions and we make decisions with inputs from you know the the the right sources intelligence et cetera But we going to make decisions And so they able to move way faster That makes people super uncomfortable. And honestly, it probably has their adversaries completely discombobulated because they're used to this bureaucratic process that takes months and months to get to any kind of decision. I love that. I love it. I do. And honestly, like a decision, an 80% decision is better than sitting around. I mean, sitting around is making a decision to do nothing. It's making a decision. Someone will make that decision for you and something will happen to you at that point. And I think that what we're seeing is we're just out, we're out OODA looping everybody. That's interesting. So that's an improvement. That's an actual big improvement. Yeah. I mean, I, yeah, like that's how startups run. I run a startup. I don't have, I'm not Microsoft or whatever, Google. I don't have like levels of bureaucracy and papers. There was a great scene from the movie Ford versus Ferrari, which is like a world-class movie. Terrific movie, yeah. But there's a scene where they lose the first Le Mans and they're like, you know, Matt Damon's in there as Carroll Shelby. And he's like watching this red folder go around. He says, hey, that red folder has been like 27 people before it got to you, Henry Ford. You know, I just want to work directly for you and we can get this done. Trump has done that. He's got rid of the 27 people process piece and it makes people uncomfortable. But I think they're doing a good job. I want to go back to Pete Hickseth for a minute because, like I said, he's a big character. You spoke about him. You were kind of dubious about him, kind of doubtful about him when you spoke about him shortly after you left. But you're now sort of saying he serves his purpose. Where do you doubt him? Where is he not the right man? Honestly, I'm not there now. So I have, it seems to me like a lot's changed in last year. Okay. People have learned their roles. They've learned to trust the people around them, which I think was part of the issue early on. And so to me, it seems to be well-functioning from the outside. I'm not there, but it seems to be pretty well-functioning. So you're now building autonomous flying, you know, what kind of planes are these? These are cargo flights. Yeah, it's a utility UAS. Think about it like a C-130, a little mini jetliner size. It's a large airplane designed to do mostly cargo delivery. I mean, those things are huge. It's going to fly itself? It will fly itself, remotely piloted with an autonomy stack. Yeah, I mean, it's a big plane, 85,000-pound gross takeoff weight, dual high-bibestero fan. It looks like a little regional airliner. Yeah. So how far away are we from an automated air force or is that not a real thing? Well, I mean, Elon wanted that this year. Yeah. Yeah, I think that for the foreseeable future, there will be pilots flying aircraft. They may be flying aircraft remotely. And that could be a thing I think that we see more and more. There's a downside to that, which is latency from data links. you're reliant on a data link which could be impacted by weather or the adversary or just bad it you know bad hardware so i think we'll see pilots in there for for a while for some you know we we are trying to automate like a routine mission that is very boring and typically like the boring kind of dangerous slow things are the things that are the easiest to automate and i think that you'll see more automation in those spaces than maybe the you know here i am in the Wes, in the merge, like fighting against another fighter, I think that'll probably be mostly human for a while. There's way more edge cases. It's a harder problem to solve, a harder technical problem to solve. So in this kind of problem you were talking about before, where you have to serve the technology you have, but you might need other technology that would just take too much time to put together. You were discussing this in a very calm way, but I could see a disaster scenario kind of growing out of that. I mean, eventually, I assume China's going to make its move on Taiwan. We're kind of committed to stopping them. I don't know. I mean, the intelligence people I talk to sort of tell me, yeah, we're committed to that. I don't know how real that is. What keeps you up at night about this? I mean, do you think that there's trouble ahead or do you think this is something we're going to be able to handle? Yeah, I would not. I'm not the right person to project whether something will happen or not. I think you have to prepare for the worst case scenario. But I also think that preparation has immediate applicability to deterrence from preventing that from happening. OK. So, you know, if I look at a China scenario, Taiwan, South China, see something else somewhere. there's like the immediate you know 10-day period and then in my opinion what would mostly wind up happening is it would look a lot like ukraine and russia which is an extended kind of drawn out thing the my biggest fear is that a lot of things die in the first 10-day period so we lose a lot of capability and a lot of that capability is exquisite it's hard to manufacture in some cases the manufacturing lines have been shut down for like a decade plus and there's There's just not even anybody to manufacture it. And then it takes us a long time to rebuild out of that for the two to three year kind of period that we would need. We're a long ways away from where we were, you know, Freedom Forge, World War II style, where we can just turn on industry. And all of a sudden we're making so many forts or making tanks or airplanes. The level of weapon system now is so much more exquisite. There's only certain companies now to do it. But I view the world – what I would love is if every 747, 737 that Boeing turned out also had hard points on the wings and you could mount El Razum's on them and immediately turn a fleet of 1,000 airplanes into – and snap that finger and go. That's what we're trying to do. We're building a cargo airplane that is designed from scratch to also deliver munitions. So if the time comes, you know, and China will know this is not a, this is a public thing that we're advertising. They will say, okay, there's a thousand planes that we can just immediately add in. They're cheap. There's a hot production line. You can manufacture one a month or, you know, 50 a month. That I think is, is where we need to go. The department that like we, we just love building our exquisite cool stuff. We hate building simple things. That's just the reality of where we are. The air force, air force is the worst. You know, they love building. I love their planes, I know. Yeah. All right. Colin Carroll, veteran combat deployed Marine and the chief of staff to the deputy secretary at the Department of War under Hegseth. Now building autonomous AI-enabled aircraft, which just sounds amazing to me at Atropo. Really nice talking to you, Colin. I appreciate your coming on. It's very interesting. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks, Andrew. I'll talk to you again. Thank you. Colin Carroll, really interesting things. We don't get to talk about this much on my show. We stick to the culture, but I'm really fascinated by what Trump is doing in terms of rejiggering our systems toward China. And that was a very clear headed view of the future and the problems. For less clear headed thinking and just complete random comedy and absurdity, come to the Andrew Klavan show on Friday. I will be there. I'd love to see you there as well. Bye.
